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03.07

2007 Women's History Month

By Mary Ann Hoffman

March is Women’s History Month, and we celebrate some of the outstanding female engineers.

Edith Clarke (1883-1959)

Clarke was a woman who attained many firsts during her lifetime:

• first woman to earn an electrical engineering graduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

• first woman to present a technical paper before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE), a predecessor society of the IEEE

• first woman to teach at the University of Texas-Austin's engineering department

• first woman to be elected as a Fellow of the AIEE (1948)

Edith Clarke was born in 1883 in a small rural community in Maryland, during a time when it was almost unheard of for a woman to acquire a college degree. Clarke was orphaned at an early age and received a small inheritance which allowed her to enroll at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She studied mathematics and astronomy and received an A.B. degree. In 1912, she became a computing assistant to George A. Campbell at AT&T. During her tenure, she learned a great deal about the theory of transmission lines and electric circuits. In 1918, she enrolled at MIT and earned an M.S. in electrical engineering in 1919 — the first woman to earn an MSEE degree from MIT.

Clarke worked at General Electric (GE) from 1919 until her retirement. (She left GE for one year in 1921 to teach at a woman's college in Turkey.) She was officially recognized by GE as an engineer in 1922, and became a salaried electrical engineer.

In February 1926, she became the first woman to present a paper at an AIEE meeting, it was later published in the Transactions of the AIEE. She presented her second paper in March 1931.

Clarke retired from GE in 1945 and joined the EE faculty at the University of Texas-Austin in 1947. She taught until 1956, and upon her retirement, returned to her native Maryland. She died in October 1959 at the age of 76.

Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992)

IRE Fellow, 1962, "For contributions in the field of automatic programming."

"Amazing Grace," as she is sometimes referred, is considered the first lady of software and first mother-teacher of all computer programmers. She registered successful careers in academia, business, and the U.S. Navy, while making history in the computer field.

Grace Hopper was born and raised in New York City, and spent her summers at the family's cottage on Lake Wentworth in New Hampshire. She was intrigued by the way things worked, and enjoyed taking items apart and trying to put them back together.

Grace received her B.A. in mathematics and physics from Vassar in 1928, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale in 1930 and 1934, respectively. She taught at Vassar from 1933 to 1943, after which she joined the Navy and was commissioned a lieutenant, junior grade in 1944. She was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University and became one of the first programmers of the Navy's Harvard Mark I computer.

While working on the Mark II she traced a malfunction to a moth trapped in a relay. She showed her sense of humor by taping this moth in a logbook with a comment that this bug had been found. (The term 'bug,' referring to an unexpected defect, dates back at least to Thomas Edison's early years as a telegrapher.)

In 1946, she joined Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and stayed with the company (and its successors Remington-Rand and Sperry-Rand) until her retirement in 1971. During her tenure she made a major contribution to programming languages and developed the first compiler, A-0, in 1952 and later modified it to produce the A-2 in 1953.

All through her life, Hopper was active in the U.S. Naval Reserves, rising to the rank of Rear Admiral, a rank she received as a special presidential appointment in 1985. In 1991, she was awarded the National Medal of Technology "for her pioneering accomplishments in the development of computer programming languages that simplified computer technology and opened the door to a significantly larger universe of users." She was the first woman to receive this award as an individual.

She longed to see the beginning of the 21st Century, but passed away in her sleep on 1 January 1992, 9 years short of her dream. She was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Va., with a full Navy ceremony.

On 6 January 1996, the U.S. Navy christened a destroyer in her honor, the U.S.S. Hopper.

Mary Ann Hoffman is manager of archival and Web services at the IEEE History Center at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. Visit the IEEE History Center's Web page at: www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center. Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.